Morphoses / The Wheeldon Company

Morphoses / The Wheeldon Company
New York City Center
Friday, October 30, 2009

Program “B”:
Continnum
Softly as I Leave You
Rhapsody Fantasie

Christopher Wheeldon returned to City Center with this second of two programs, featuring two of his own ballets and one by the Nederlands Dans Theater-associated choreographers Lightfoot León. While the three ballets are of varying quality, the evening was an entertaining one, as Wheeldon, a good showman, seeks to bridge the gap between performer and audience by personally introducing the ballets to the audience and by showing engaging film clips of the dancers rehearsing and discussing their motivations.

Continuum, the opener, was made for the San Francisco Ballet in 2002. It is set for four women and four men to a selection of György Ligeti piano pieces, so austere that listening to them for an extended period begins to seem like sucking a lemon. The ballet is what might by now be termed "vintage" Wheeldon: arm gesturing; contortionist pas de deux; some flashes of brightness. In other words, choreography that is long on geometry and short on poetry. Not that I am against the one and in favor of the other; it is just that Wheeldon is capable of integrating them, yet in these Ligeti ballets, due to the nature of the music, I guess, he rarely does so. For example, there a is lift in which the woman places her flexed foot into the palm of her partner’s hand, which he uses to haul her around his shoulders into a clunky, bent-leg waving position. It is particularly in the pas de deux, with the seemingly constant agonistic posturing that this compartmentalization is most evident, although the piece for Andrew Crawford and Gabrielle Lamb (who also had a challenging, inventive solo), had a more compelling momentum. There comes a point where all edge becomes ho-hum.

The pianists were Cameron Grant and Susan Walters, familiar from New York City Ballet. From my vantage point in the first balcony, I could see beneath the stage a sliver of the right end of the piano, and perpendicular to it, with its back to me, the harpsichord that was used for one of the pieces. Fascinating to watch was the occasional glimpse of Grant’s right hand on the piano’s upper register—but even more fascinating was seeing the virtuoso performance he gave on the harpsichord.

Softly as I Leave You is a piece for three performers: Drew Jacoby ("guest dance goddess," according to her bio), Rubinald Pronk ("Holland’s sexiest ballet dancer ever," according to his bio), and a wooden box, performed by the Box (no bio; despite its prominence, it seemed a little stiff). The piece begins with Jacoby flailing and throwing herself against the walls of the upright wooden Box to the Kyrie Eleison. (She’s trapped; it’s a metaphor—get it?) When the music turns into the Air on the G String, we see Mr. Pronk, posed to the left of the box, who then begins a series of strong/lyrical movements of the modern-ballet type. Jacoby leaves the box and joins him for a bit. When the music then shifts to Arvo Pärt’s "Spiegel im Spiegel," familiar to all Wheeldon-watchers as the music for the (quite poetic, and very beautiful) After the Rain pas de deux, our expectation is only slightly shaken when, after Pronk enters the box, Jacoby soon joins him. The End.

The evening’s closer was the New York premier of Wheeldon’s Rhapsody Fantaisie, set to eight Rachmaninoff piano pieces, for six women and six men. The expectation that this would be a big ballet (like Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet?) comes from the title, its sweeping score, the bright red-orange costumes (harem pants for the men and knee-length dresses for the women), and the backdrop of large horizontal cones by set designer Los Carpinteros. However, the ballet is at heart a chamber piece with big packaging.

There is an exuberant opening ensemble, and a good, dynamic, balletic piece for the men. As he shows in Continuum, Wheeldon shows here, too, that he is capable of crafting very fine solos for the women. The first pas de deux, however, along with certain other sections, are indications that Wheeldon is too often tempted to regress further and further from the ballet vocabulary and wades more and more into the murky world of that kind of modern ballet that prefers the ultimate distortion and corruption of classical steps to an exploration and re-creation of them—a direction that last year’s excellent Commedia follows, and which he can do very well. Rhapsody Fantaisie again features an abundance of compulsive arm waving and gesturing; the head-caressing becomes a cliché fast. (What does it all mean? Is it post-modern miming? Is it angst? Are the women miming having babies? Is it meaningless? I could use some help here.)

The ballet, while danced with great verve and intensity, is uneven and seems to be unfinished. The pas de deux for Wendy Whelan and Andrew Crawford starts out well, but ends on a weak note as Crawford awkwardly lowers Whelan to the floor, where she remains prone in a pose that serves as a transition to the final piece. The rest of the cast enter and step over her as she rolls upstage. The ballet does seem to have something to say beyond just dancing; I’m just not sure what. Is Wheeldon influenced by some of Alexei Ratmansky’s recent work, which deals, very proficiently, and with the use of the ballet vocabulary, with human interactions, even feelings? If so, this may be a fruitful direction/competition for him, but the choreography needs a cleaner articulation. The loose structure of the piece as a whole collapsed by the time it got to the end.

While the works presented were somewhat uneven, the dancers and musicians were excellent, and along with Wheeldon, deserve praise for showing us engaging and thought-provoking pieces in this season of ballet drought.